A semiconductor device can be formed from a monocrystalline semiconductor body using different processing techniques. Those techniques may include growing epitaxial layers, introducing dopant atoms, or forming electrodes, to name only a few. Usually, the semiconductor body is part of a wafer that has been cut from an ingot. The wafer may include a plurality of semiconductor bodies that can be cut from the wafer after the processing.
The ingot and, therefore, the wafer may include undesired impurities incorporated into the ingot during the manufacturing process. A silicon ingot formed by using the Magnetic Czochralski (MCZ) method, for example, may include nitrogen and carbon and oxygen as impurities. A silicon ingot formed using the Float Zone (FZ) method, for example, may include nitrogen. The impurity atoms are at substitutional sites in the crystal lattice of the ingot and the wafer, respectively.
Those impurities may have several negative effects. (a) Nitrogen may act as dopant, recombination center, or generation center and may, therefore, affect the electric properties of semiconductor devices formed from the wafer. (b) Nitrogen as well as carbon can react with oxygen, which may also be available in an MCZ wafer, to form complexes that act like dopants. Those dopant-like complexes may also affect the electric properties of semiconductor devices formed from the wafer. (c) Carbon may affect the diffusion of dopant atoms introduced intentionally in the manufacturing process of the semiconductor device, resulting in varying doping concentration. (d) Carbon and silicon may form undesired silicon carbide (SiC) precipitates.